Page 2 of Three-Inch Teeth

Another branch snapped, and he noticed that the top of a spindly aspen jerked and shed dead leaves as something hit it at its base.

At first, he thought it was a rockslide. They happened on the steep canyon wall, and sometimes they gathered so much momentum, they snapped off trees as they tore down the mountain.

He looked over his shoulder at the bank, where he’d parked the Polaris Ranger. He wasn’t sure he could navigate across the slick stones fast enough before a jumble of large rocks came his way.

Then a large doe mule deer crashed out of the brush and plunged headlong into the water twenty yards upriver from him. The deer paid no attention to him and he recalled Joe telling him that prey animals didn’t fear anything in the water because they knew predators came from the land.

In fact, the doe had her head turned at something behind her. Fearing something behind her. As she got to the middle of the river, she struggled for a few seconds, then she began to swim, keeping her head above the surface, bobbing it front to back like a chicken.

The current brought her closer to Clay Junior and he wondered for a second if she’d knock him off his feet. Switching his rod to his left hand, he reached behind him with his right for the back pocket of his vest and the Glock. A shot in the air might make her change course.

And that was when a massive tan bear with a dark brown hump on its back emerged from the trees, roared, and threw itself into the river in pursuit of the deer, hitting the water with a loud splash.

Not a rockslide, Clay Junior thought, but a grizzly bear more than twice his size.

The doe regained her footing as the river shallowed and she was able to scramble toward the shoreline just a few feet above Clay Junior. She was close enough that droplets of water from her thrashing sprayed across his face.

But when she was gone the bear was still there in the middle of the river and moving remarkably fast. Instead of pursuing the deer, the grizzly was coming straight at him. Swimming straight at him. It had small, close-set eyes centered in a massive round head. The bear was so large that it produced a wake in the water until it, too, found the floor of the river.

The grizzly closed the distance and rose onto its back legs and towered over him, blotting out the light. He could see its thick coat shimmer as river water sluiced out of it. Long claws were curved like yellow scythes, and the bear was close enough he could smell it. The stink was like wet dog, only twenty times worse. The bear roared at him, and Clay Junior felt his anus instinctively pucker and his limbs go weak. He’d never heard a sound that affected him in such a primal, visceral way.

Scrambling, he stepped back and his boot sole slipped on the top of a round river rock. Losing his balance, he fell back and to the side, and fumbled the Glock into the river. The weapon thumped on the side of his thigh through the waders, then slipped beneath the surface, out of sight. At the same time, the bear dropped to all fours and charged.

Clay Junior wanted to shout, “What the fuck have I done to deserve this?”

His last look at the bear before he went under was its tiny black eyes, gaping mouth, and long, sharp, scimitar-like teeth.

The grizzly lunged on top of him and pinned him flat on his back to the rocks on the floor of the river, a foot and a half beneath the surface. As the jaws closed around his head, the last sound Clay Junior heard was the awful crunch of those teeth through his skull.

His last thought was:

Would she have said yes

CHAPTER TWO

Saddlestring

THE NEXT DAY, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett was feeling all of his fifty-one years when he received a call from Clay Hutmacher, the foreman of the Double Diamond Ranch.

At that moment, he was working his way down the side of a steep mountain on foot, wearing a daypack filled with optics and gear. As he descended, he concentrated on not tripping over a sagebrush or dislodging a rock that would send him ass over teakettle down the slope to where his truck was parked.

Although it wasn’t yet noon, Joe was tired. He’d been up since before dawn, and since it was October he’d spent the entire morning in the breaklands and mountains checking hunters in the field. For the last two hours, he’d been glassing hunters and hunting camps through his spotting scope, as well as a herd of elk, a small band of mule deer, and a contingent of pronghorn antelope out on the plains.

He was exhausted, but pleasantly so, and the morning had gone smoothly. He’d witnessed no violations and issued no warnings or tickets and made no arrests. The camps he’d visited were generally clean and the hunters he’d met were friendly and ethical. Their food was hung from trees to discourage bears and no one had reported any large carnivore or wolf sightings. He was still a little surprised by the four young men he’d met early on in his rounds: hipsters from Jackson Hole with long beards and blaze-orange porkpie hats, who were hunting elk not for trophy racks but to fill their freezers for the winter. It was good to meet younger hunters keeping the local traditions alive, he thought. It encouraged him to keep doing what he was doing and knowing it was right.

Since the many elk seasons in his district had expanded over the years, legal hunting was now allowed from archery season in mid-September to limited cow/calf seasons as late as January 31. Joe was busy every day and he’d learned to pace himself. He wasn’t getting any younger.

*

THE DAY BEFORE had been more challenging. He’d encountered three elk hunters from Pennsylvania camped on Bureau of Land Management land a stone’s throw from the boundary fence of a big ranch known to locals as the Double D. The Pennsylvania hunters had made it clear to him that they intended to “corner-cross” from the parcel they were on to an adjacent public parcel by means of a ladder they had built specially for the purpose and brought with them to Wyoming. The plan, they explained, was to move across the checkerboard of public lands without stepping foot on private. The hunters showed Joe the extremely accurate GPS mapping apps they’d put on their phones to make sure they stayed legal.

Joe had warned them that corner-crossing was a complicated issue, and a newly contentious one. There were laws that allowed citizens to access all public lands, as well as laws that said that even entering the airspace of private land was trespassing. Since there was no way for the hunters to climb the ladder from corner to corner and not prevent any part of their bodies from passing over a tiny slice of private land on the way, they were risking trespassing charges from the county sheriff.

The Pennsylvania hunters were well aware of the dilemma, they told Joe, but they were willing to risk it. It was their land as much as anyone’s, they said. Joe had told them as long as they broke no Game and Fish regulations, he’d let them be. But he could do nothing to prevent their arrest by the county sheriff if that office decided to pursue it.

Joe could see both sides of the issue. Legal hunters did have the right to access public land, even if the way they did it was legally dubious. At the same time, local landowners owned huge, and hugely expensive, tracts of “private” acreage that contained squares of public land inside of it. If just anyone could access those inholdings at any time, was the private property actually private?

“Corner-locked” public land was a big issue in the West, where so much territory was owned by the federal government. There were 2.4 million acres of corner-locked land in Wyoming alone, the same size as Yellowstone Park and the Wind River Indian Reservation. That was twice as much land as Rhode Island, and it was bigger than the landmass of the state of Connecticut.

---